


courting and mourning

by capra



Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: Character Study, Coping Mechanisms, Dissociation, Gen, Healing, I promise it has a happy ending, Magical Realism, Other, Surrealism, Trauma, Yuzuru Hanyu-centric, but its effects on Yuzuru feature prominently, but they are alluded to, fears phobias and emotional blockage, healing through dreaming?, is definitely in here, knife shoes appreciation society, ksas, mentions various traumas in his past, none of the skating injuries are mentioned in detail, not graphically, recovery is a spiral, the tragedy of the earthquake and flood however, this one is even harder to tag than my previous one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-16
Updated: 2018-12-16
Packaged: 2019-09-20 00:04:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17011695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/capra/pseuds/capra
Summary: Mourning is difficult. Recovery is not linear. And coming to terms with your coping mechanisms is the prerequisite to mastering them.Or:It can’t have been just dreams, could it? Growing closer and closer to the woman in his dreams – the woman he can’t even remember upon waking – Yuzuru finds it is all brought into sudden, clear focus in Boston.





	courting and mourning

**Author's Note:**

> This story is based on a narrow range of cherrypicked personality qualities culled from my personal and very biased interpretation of the publically available personas of real human beings who are, I am quite certain, not similar at all to how they're depicted here.
> 
> In short, it's complete fiction.

 

*

Around November 2014, Yuzuru begins having dreams about a woman. The first few are cameo appearances, a face in the spectator crowd whom he recognizes, but can’t place from where. Her hair, or her purse, or the way she wears her coat collar turned up against the cold, hold his attention. He doesn’t remember most of these early appearances, and when he does, he wonders bemusedly why he’s done so before putting it out of his mind.

In the way that dreams will do, she begins to appear in different colors and styles as her appearances grow more frequent. There’s magenta one night, a fluorescent radiant hue that makes him squint to look past her, looking for Brian at the kiss and cry. What are his hands saying? Another sal? Three sals? But he’s already done both. He stumbles over his toepick, and suddenly he’s seventeen again, face first flat on the ice, and Romeo is screaming. He gets a 50.50 for his combined score. All the interviewers want him to answer in French.

Another night he dreams in grass green. Pooh, Blade the cricket plush, Nam, Brian, Tracy, even Javier, are all having a picnic with him, in a little green park that’s dripping with the saturated, lush green richness that only exists in Sendai. But across the street from this park, the Cricket Club waits with friendly patience, watching them and participating from a distance. It’s too big to sit on the picnic blanket, Pooh reminds it gently, and the Club sulks softly, disappointed but trying to be a grown up about it.

Then: the woman is sitting where the Club was. As she stands up, the bright, vivid greens drip out of her clothes like dye, pooling around her feet. The woman stands where the Club should be, stark and chillingly gray, from her skin to her clothes to her fingernails. The tide of Sendai green dye flows forward, crossing the street toward the park where Yuzu and his friends sit, and for the first time in his entire life and probably all the ones before this one, Sendai’s green fills Yuzu with dread. He stands up, tiptoeing onto the picnic blanket to get away from the green river. He snatches up Pooh a moment before he’s consumed by it.

On several nights, the woman stands in a void of space in which no horizons, no boundaries, give clues to its breadth or depth. She faces Yuzu wearing a proper officeworker’s suit skirt and pumps, heels primly together, dark hair pinned neatly back. They stand on a vast glass plate in the middle of the void, with no earth below, no sky or stars above. From beyond the corner of Yuzu’s vision comes the squeak and squeal of a water faucet being turned on. Water rushes across the glass, covering its surface, and spills over all four of its edges, falling down into the void below them. The water’s surface is black, clear and empty at the same time.

The woman watches Yuzu, unmoved, as the water washes around her feet and ankles, rippling where its flow has to curve. Slight, slight reflections of light in those ripples draw Yuzu’s attention downward, first to the glass floor at her feet, then the floor at his own. His skates cut the water’s flow, and it roils and burbles as it rushes around and through the blades. These ripples throw up reflections, and those reflections reach others. With a jolt, Yuzu looks at the center of the glass world on which he and the silent woman stand, and sees that under the glass, in the void beneath them, sparkling bright points of light are racing down, away from their feet into the depths below.

Yuzu looks up, and sees those same sparkling lights racing down toward him, down like shooting stars. The lights – shining droplets of water – light the sky below, and the void above. Yuzu looks across the glass world at the woman again, and around her there are a million billion stars shining and dancing. In her eyes, he sees reflections of the billion trillion stars that surround him. She smiles, pleased.

On Christmas Eve of December 2015, a little over a week after his resounding victory at the Grand Prix Final, the woman arrives in Yuzu’s dream alone. A warm, candlelit glow surrounds her, and him, as he steps forward to gently take her hand. Her hair is dark cobalt blue and piled over one shoulder, cascading down in waves past her delicate, almond-curved jawline and fragile, white porcelain neck. She wears geometric gold jewelry – triangles, diamantes, all connected together and suspended upon her body by golden chains so delicate they look like spidersilk. She tips her head to one side, displaying the length of her neck, and everything that adorns it, for his appreciation.

He doesn’t ask who she is. He doesn’t need to. Her power is icing him over, freezing through the his marrow until bloody crystalline prisms swell within his bones, so sharp that they cut him through from the inside out. Her eyes are depthless and gravitational, and he tips her chin up with his thumb and leans in to kiss her. He doesn’t have to try to charm her, and she doesn’t pretend to quail in his arms to flatter him. They come together without hesitation, bodies fitted against each other seamlessly. Her mouth is the most desirable thing he’s ever experienced. Where his blood drips onto her skin, it turns to gold.

He wakes, sweating, with an itch under his skin that he usually only gets from sex. But his breath is clear and smooth, and the itch quickly fades. He vaguely remembers an encouraging voice, a tenderly loving touch, and deep eyes as blue as the black night sky is dark. Practice goes very well that day. His skating at Japanese Nationals, later that week, goes even better.

*

Four months later, in Boston, he sees her again. Despite his flawless short, or perhaps because of it, the night before the free skate he barely sleeps a wink. There is so much to accomplish tomorrow, he reminds himself, so _sleep_. He does not listen.

The free is a disaster.

Afterward, at the exhibition, he moves in a daze, feeling like his mind is barely tethered to his body. Aching, terrified, feeling like every breath he draws is a wheeze, a struggle. They’re not, but by now logic has far less hold over his heart than fear. With the opening pose of _Requiem_ he silences the crowd, and they wait, breathless, as he digs in his blades to begin.

He opens his eyes to see himself, viewed from far above, and he thinks, “I didn’t know the sky camera’s rigging could support a human’s weight.”

“It can’t,” she tells him, and it feels like the most natural thing in the world for her to be sitting beside him here.

Now that he’s noticed her, _now_ he can feel the chill that radiates from her cold blue skin, billowing heavily down like the cloud of vapor that spills from the freezerbox and onto your toes. You’ve only opened the thing to get a damn icepack for your aches, but the cold breathes you in, and when you’re this tired and this sore, it feels like it’s trying to _pull_ you in, into the small, cramped, _quiet_ space within it, where those aches won’t hurt at all anymore. Cold therapy is good for body pain, everyone knows that.

“You’re down there,” she says, and he realizes he’s gotten distracted again, thinking wistfully about napping amongst the frozen squid in his mother’s deep freezer. He drags his attention back to himself – to the himself he’s watching perform the _Requiem_ on the ice below, the him who isn’t him at all right now. He thinks he’d probably be confused if he wasn’t dreaming, but dreams have their own sort of logic to them.

Then he remembers he didn’t sleep last night, that he’s not dreaming, and suddenly this perch of his, balanced on the narrow steel rails of the lighting truss, bladed feet swinging carelessly through the three stories of air beneath him, begins to feel precarious indeed.

“They’ll talk about this performance for years,” she murmurs, leaning on him with a lover’s familiarity, and he stops thinking about falling to the ice for long enough to wonder whether he’s supposed to be falling for her. Her long hair spills loose over his shoulder and back; her temple, beautifully flawless and fearfully cold, settles on the ball of his shoulder, right on top of the bone. Below it, his arm feels numb.

He can’t fall for someone he already is in love with, he thinks.

“I hope they will,” he murmurs, not really paying attention to the words. Of course he does. He hopes that of every performance, except the bad ones.

“If it’s your last one, they’ll have to.”

The inevitability in that statement should make him angry, he knows. He should feel frustration, refusal, bitter spited determination. Instead he only feels hollow. Resigned.

“I hope they forgive me.”

The music is building, the water is rushing around his feet. It’s nothing like the crystal beauty of the glass and water world. This tide is frothy, muddy gray and brown. It whacks him in the shins with tree branches, stones, childrens’ toys. He watches himself dance on the ice far below, watches the nuance, the desperate longing, the terror, the loss. This truly is an exceptional skate. Even he can see that. And now there are only a few moments left, a single phrase of the music remaining, before it’s all over. His heart thuds sluggishly in his chest, straining, lethargic despite the exertion he’s putting out, despite how fast his pulse should be moving, how quickly his body should be receiving freshly oxygenated blood.

“What if they didn’t have to?” Her voice, beside his ear, is a crisp snap of peppermint. Her breath, icy cold, should make his lungs seize, but he draws a deep breath and it feels like the first easy one he’s drawn in four and a half minutes.

“I want to keep skating,” he whispers. There’s one spin left.

“It will cost,” she breathes. Seductive. Her lips close around the shell of his ear, teasing, plucking at the cartilage. An electric shiver streaks down his spine.

“ _A_ _nything_ ,” he agrees.

He’s back in his body. The spotlight above is blinding. He’s staring directly into it. He doesn’t remember anything about the last four and a half minutes. He assumes he must have skated well, because the entire arena is _howling_ its love for him. His cheeks are bright red, chapped from the rink air, and glossily streaked with tears.

*

A week later, the diagnosis is confirmed. _Lisfranc_. Hearing it hurts far less than he expected it to. He remembers feelings he’s never experienced, and several he has.

He remembers one more dream. One from a long, long, long time ago.

She was much bigger than him at that time. A woman, a _neesan,_ while he was still just a child. He was crying, but trembling with the effort of crying silently. There were so many others around, and surely many of them were sleeping. His fear couldn’t be more important than their rest. The floor was hard. His belly ached. His heart ached. Why did crying have to make noise to be satisfying? He just wanted to sleep. He just wanted his family to go home again. His father’s arms were curled around him, holding him close. He tried his hardest to re-believe that his father’s protection could be enough to keep them all safe.

But now he knew that wasn’t true, and that isn’t the kind of revelation you can unlearn.

In the semidarkness, an old man coughed. A small baby cried, and two voices lifted to try to hush it. Its mother, and maybe its sister? He wished he could have protected Saya from this the way that brothers should.

In the midst of his grief, the woman arrived quietly, dressed in the uniform of the relief workers, and at first he did not even notice her presence, until their eyes met in the dim lanternlight. She opened up the blanket she held tucked under her arm and began to wrap it over the tired curve of his father’s back. He reached up to take one corner, helping her to tug it into place. At the time, he hadn’t thought anything of her blue hair, her fathomless eyes as broad and cobalt blue as the deep sea.

She tucked his own small blanket more tightly around him; it must have been a particularly smart way to tuck it, because the tight, shivering strain in his back and shoulders suddenly felt less severe, less painful. Then she bent close, moving slowly, and he nodded to give her his agreement that she could come closer.

The blue woman gently kissed his forehead, then kissed her fingertips and touched them to the parts of him that she could not as easily reach: the pulse in his chest, the crests of his ears, and the bones of his ankles. He nodded, with the sobriety that children who still believe in magic afford to any sufficiently mysterious or ritual-like action, and she smiled. Pleased. Sleep claimed him quickly, and when he woke the next day, he had not remembered any of the previous night’s distress, or its encounter.

“How odd,” he murmurs to himself now, forgetting that Kikuchi, his mother, and his doctor are all in the room with him. His fingers rub up and down the lines of his ankle, following the contour of tendons under the skin like the soothing grooves in a worry stone.

“What an odd place for the heartstrings to be.”

 

 

*

**Author's Note:**

> If we shadows have offended, think but this and all is mended: That you have but slumber’d here while these visions did appear. And that this weak and idle theme be no more yielding than a dream.
> 
> taken from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Puck, V.i.425-430
> 
> *  
> also: Christmas Eve is widely considered the most romantic night of the year in Japan. take that as you will. [eyes emoji]  
> *  
> find me screaming about yuzuru hanyu and mental health on discord at KSSC.


End file.
